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weekly policy summary



Here's what's been happening on debian-policy this week.

Many old proposals and all done proposals have been removed from this
posting.

Note: for details of the policy process, see
http://www.debian.org/~srivasta/policy/ch3.html. Also, this summary is
available on the web at http://kitenet.net/~joey/policy-weekly.html.

                           Accepted Amendments
                                    
Definition of extra priority (#33076)
  * Consensus.
  * Proposed on 8 Feb 1999 by Santiago Vila; seconded by Peter S
    Galbraith, M.C. Vernon, Jules Bean and Julian Gilbey.
  * Clarification of what the "extra" priority means.
    
                               Amendments
                                    
Add VISUAL when checking for user's editor (#41121)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by David Frey and Julian
    Gilbey.
  * Programs should check VISUAL before EDITOR when trying to figure
    out what editor to use. sensible-editor already does this.
    
Data section (#38902)
  * Stalled for 1 week.
  * Proposed on 3 Jun 1999 by Darren O. Benham; seconded by Peter S
    Galbraith, Peter Makholm and Peter Makholm.
  * "Since there is interest in packaging census data, maps, genome
    data and other huge datasets I and since most people agreed that
    dropping them in main or contrib is not a great idea, I propose
    the creation of a data section to reside along side of main,
    contrib and non-free." Includes rules about what goes in this
    section.
    
Policy still suggests /etc/rc.boot instead of /etc/rcS.d (#32448)
  * Stalled for 1 week.
  * Proposed on 26 Jan 1999 by Brian Servis; seconded by Julian Gilbey
    and Joey Hess.
  * Change policy to refer to /etc/rcS.d instead of the old
    /etc/rc.boot/
    
                            Active proposals
                                    
Usr/share/doc vs. /usr/doc (#40706)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava; seconded by Joey Hess.
  * /usr/doc has moved, and we want to have a good transition to
    /usr/share/doc without breaking backwards compatability and
    incremental upgrades. This proposal is to make each package manage
    the transition on its own by managing a /usr/doc/package ->
    /usr/share/doc/package symlink. At some future date, all these
    links will be removed.
    ( Several proposals have been posted to this bug report, I am
    covering only the latest one. )
    
Debian-policy has an unclear statement on dependancies and priorities
(#39398)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed by Chris Fearnley; seconded by Joey Hess.
  * A clarification to wording about package priorities. No real
    meaning seems to be changed by this proposal.
    
Naming Conventions for modules (#41113)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed by Alexander Reelsen.
  * perl modules are named libfoo-perl; python modules are named
    python-foo. It's not consitent. This proposal is that we come up
    with a general naming scheme for all language modules that is
    consistant accross languages.
    
Build-time dependencies on binary packages (#41232)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed by Antti-Juhani Kaijana; seconded by Edward Betts.
  * Proposes the addition of six new fields to debian/control to
    specifiy different kinds of source dependancies (and conflicts,
    suggests, etc). Does't handle packages that need unpacked source
    of another package to build.
    ( Lots of constructive comments, some discussion about the field
    names. No general objections. )
    
Changelog.html.gz sanitization (#40934)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed by Joey Hess.
  * A proposal to make a plain text dump of html changelogs available
    so changelogs are always available at a consitent location. The
    html changelog may optionally be included as changelog.html.gz
    
Get rid of undocumented(7) symlinks (#39830)
  * Under discussion.
  * Proposed on 20 Jun 1999 by Roland Rosenfeld.
  * All programs are still required to provide manpages, but
    undocumented.7 is done away with by this proposal.
    
                            Stalled proposals
                                    
Rewrite of "Configuration files" section (#40766)
  * Stalled for 1 week.
  * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess.
  * A replacement for section 4.7 that clarifies the different between
    "configuration file" and "conffile" and uses the two consitently.
    ( probably a consensus )
    
Wording cleanup w.r.t. conffile/configuration file (#40767)
  * Stalled for 1 week.
  * Proposed by Steve Greenland; seconded by Joey Hess.
  * This cleans up references to "conffiles" and "confuguration files"
    throughout policy.
    
                              Old proposals
                                    
Permit/require use of bz2 for source packages (#39299)
  * Old.
  * Proposed on 10 Jun 1999 by Chris Lawrence; seconded by Goswin
    Brederlow.
  * "I propose that we permit the use of bzip2 to compress source
    package files (.orig.tar and .diff for most packages, .tar for
    native packages). I further propose that the use of bzip2 be
    mandatory for newly uploaded source files, and that any existing
    source packages in the archive in gzip format exceeding 5 MB of
    compressed space be converted upon the freeze for potato."
    ( The reason this was proposed is because we're almost overflowing
    the second source CD already. This is a very contentious proposal.
    )
    
A better way to configure debian systems (#38703)
  * Old.
  * Proposed on 1 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow; seconded by Falk
    Hueffner.
  * Another configuration management proposal.
    
Editor and sensible-editor
  * Old.
  * Proposed on 2 Jun 1999 by Goswin Brederlow.
  * Instead of having programs use $EDITOR and fall back to editor,
    just use sensible-editor.
    
A pre-install required space checking mechanism for Debian packages
(#37999)
  * Old.
  * Proposed on 19 May 1999 by Manoj Srivastava.
  * The idea is to enable tools like apt to check if a set of packages
    will fit on a disk, taking various partitions into account. This
    will require adding something like the output of du to the package
    or to the Packages file or to a new file that can be downloaded.
    The details are still being hashed out.
    
Contact address for virtual package name list (#26159)
  * Old.
  * Proposed by Adam di Carlo.
  * Contact name in virtual-packages-list should be debian-policy, not
    Christian Schwarz.
    ( This *must* be implemented, possibly by referring to the
    policy-modification process. )
    
Debian Logo License (#26915)
  * Old.
  * Proposed by Manoj Srivastava.
  * No actual proposal included.
    ( Can probably be closed, especially given the recent vote(s). )
    
Debian-policy could include emacs policy (#30036)
  * Old.
  * Proposed by Santiago Vila.
  * Discussion about including sub-policies (emacs, menu) in the
    debian-policy package.
    ( How does this interact with accepted amendment 37713? )
  _________________________________________________________________

Last modified: Fri Jul 16 14:32:01 1999

-- 
see shy jo


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